Whether it remains there four weeks from now is anyone's guess.

That's because May 31 is the deadline in a confrontation between the scouts and the city of Philadelphia that has been building for years.

Can the Boy Scouts - specifically, the Philadelphia area's 69,000-member Cradle of Liberty Council - bar openly homosexual people and atheists from membership?

The U.S. Supreme Court says yes.

Can Philadelphia city officials allow a private organization that discriminates to freely use public, taxpayer-supported property?

The U.S. Supreme Court says no.

Those are the ingredients in a volatile mix of law, emotion and politics that threatens to explode on June 1 - the day the scouts must be out of the elegant Beaux Arts building the scouts built in 1928 on a half-acre of city-owned land.

And to add to the confusion, the Boy Scouts' National Council in Irving, Texas, seems to be taking an arm's length attitude toward Philadelphia's predicament.

Spokesman Gregg Shields said the National Council - which in 2003 ordered Philadelphia scouts to revoke a nondiscrimination policy adopted to defuse the city standoff - will not intercede on Philadelphia's behalf.

"This is a local issue for the Cradle of Liberty Council, this is their situation," Shields said.

Shields said National Council officials do not consider Philadelphia's dispute to have anything to do with atheism, homosexuality, or any other core element of their bylaws.

"This is solely a matter of where they want to place their local offices," Shields said.

Jeff Jubelirer, spokesman for the Cradle of Liberty Council, said he did not believe the National Council was distancing itself: "We talk with them regularly and we've made it clear we want to resolve this locally."

City officials have said the scouts can stay if they pay a $200,000-a-year "fair market rental" for the property.

The Cradle of Liberty Council, which governs scouting in Philadelphia and parts of Montgomery and Delaware Counties, has said it should not have to pay additional rent for a structure it built, renovated for $2.6 million in 1994, and spends $60,000 annually to maintain. The scouts, in turn, have asked the city to credit or reimburse more than $1.5 million for capital improvements they made.

City Solicitor Shelley R. Smith acknowledged that the Boy Scouts "do a lot of good work" in the city.

"But this administration's position is they either change their policy, pay rent, or vacate the premises," Smith said.

"It's really about the building," Jubelirer said. "It was the first erected scout headquarters in the country."

The Boy Scouts of America has always had close relationships with local governments, but the Cradle of Liberty Council is in a class of its own.

Scouting was a Philadelphia institution long before City Council voted to lease the scouts the half-acre at 22d and Winter Streets in perpetuity for a nominal $1 a year.

Consider The Ideal Scout.

It was sculpted in 1915 by Robert Tait McKenzie, a Canadian-born surgeon and educator and friend of Lord Robert Baden-Powell, the British soldier who founded scouting in 1907. McKenzie settled in Philadelphia and became a University of Pennsylvania professor and early board member of the Boy Scouts in Philadelphia.

And before taking up their current headquarters, Philadelphia scouts made their home in America's holy of holies: Independence Hall.

"There are some old timers on our board and they have a lot of emotion that resonates with that building," Jubelirer said of the current headquarters. "It's the symbolism."

The national organization appealed the ruling in a suit filed by an openly gay New Jersey scout barred from serving as a troop leader.

Scouts must swear an oath "to God and my country" and to obey "Scout Law," which includes keeping oneself "physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight."

In 2000 the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale that the scouts are a private group and thus have the right of "expressive association" under the First Amendment to set their own membership rules.

The legal victory quickly soured as municipal officials nationwide began reexamining long-standing relationships with local scouts. Unlike the scouts, local public officials were bound by another line of Supreme Court opinions that barred taxpayer support for any group that discriminates.

In 2006 the Supreme Court let stand a California Supreme Court ruling affirming the city of Berkeley's decision to revoke free marina use for Sea Scouts.

Unlike Berkeley, Philadelphia almost immediately became a cause celebre of civil libertarians, atheists, equal-rights and gay-rights groups, conservative Christians and "American values" advocates.

When May 31 passes - and if the scouts don't leave - the city would have to begin eviction proceedings. The scouts could file a countersuit and could remain in the building while the litigation continues.

It could take years.

Jubelirer said litigation was an option the scouts were keeping open. But he also doesn't sound eager about it.

"Certainly we've been approached by any number of national and local firms willing to represent us," Jubelirer said. "Yes, we could go into litigation and at the end of the day the one who wins, do they actually win? They kick us out, there are a lot of raw feelings. It's the kind of situation where both sides lose."